Peter Beverloo

Another busy week has passed with 673 commits to WebKit’s repository and 637 to Chromium’s, totaling up to 1,310 changes. Highlights include the availability of a method to get cryptographically strong pseudo-random numbers and more CSS Style Selector performance improvements.

The Google Web Search team just launched an extension which allows you to block websites from appearing in the search results. Using it won’t just improve the accuracy locally, but it’ll also share your blocked sites with Google. Eventually it may influence a website’s ranking, thus improving search quality as a whole.

The Web Inspector team landed quite some patches last week. Double clicking on an entry in the Network Panel will now open the resource in a new tab, full reloads (thus bypassing the cache) may be done by pressing <Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + R> within the Inspector and traversing between suggested values without entering anything is a possibility now as well. Finally, support for the File System View has been removed.

Following quite some discussion, Adam Barth announced he landed support for a cryptographically strong pseudo-random number generator. The feature is available as the window.crypto.getRandomValues method and can fill any integer-based Array Buffer with random values. Meanwhile, Brandan Eich expressed the intention to standardize a better random number generator at the EcmaScript level.

As for experimental features, part of a prototype implementation of the proposed LocaleInfo API in EcmaScript landed as a V8 extension in WebKit. The API aims to provide a consistent, rich internationalization API for doing anything from formatting currencies to getting information about the used region and calendar.

Antti Koivisto taught the CSS Style Selector to skip over sibling selectors and faster sorting, which bring some minor improvements, after which he landed two more awesome patches: one which enables ancestor identifier filtering for tree building, halving the remaining time in style matching over a typical page load, and a fast path for simple selectors that speed up matching up another 50% on some websites.

Other changes which occurred last week include:

The recent work on WebKit’s XSS Filter will be available on Chrome’s dev-channel shortly.

Support for PCRE Regular Expressions has been removed from WebKit entirely.

The about: URLs will now be auto-completed in Chromium, even if you never visited them before.

The filesystem: protocol has been implemented for usage with the File System API.

And that’s all again for this week. If you’re interested in web specifications as well, the W3C announced it extended the HTML Working Charter, together with a renewed timeline for HTML5: Last Call in May, to be followed by the Recommendation status in 2014.